Sundry Works Help · Paintings

Cataloguing your paintings

Your catalog - add paintings and open the one you're working on.

What it's for

The Paintings tab is the master list of every painting you've catalogued and the record that every other tab builds on. Whatever painting is open here is what the Story, Card, Reel, and Images tabs work from - the image and title carry across on their own.

What's next

With nothing open, the right-hand side of this page shows four cards, in the order the work actually happens: Photo and details, Let it do the writing, Make the things, Send it out. That is the whole of what this app is for, on one screen.

On an empty catalogue they are a plain account of what each step gives you. Once you have paintings, each card says what is true today - "3 paintings have a photo and no words yet" - and pressing it opens whichever painting is furthest behind on that step, on the tab that does that job. The first card has no tab to open, because its work happens here: it narrows the list beside it instead, so the dropdown over there reads "Missing Image (3)".

The four never move and never go away. A card with nothing left on it folds down to its name and a green tick, in the same place - hover over it for the sentence. Nothing ready because the words are not written is not the same news as nothing ready because it is all made, so only the second one folds.

Underneath, Sort the list by what needs work puts the catalogue itself in that order - worst first, essentials before anything else. That used to be half a screen of rows here, saying what the column beside it already says.

This half of the page used to hold the Overview's "Needs attention" panel. It is still there, on the Overview tab, where a summary is the whole job.

Under the four cards is your backup. When one is due - you have never taken one, or the last was over a month ago - it is a fifth card, Back up your catalogue, with Export all on it and Restore from file as a link underneath. When one is not due it is a single grey line, "Backed up 3 days ago", with the same two as links beside it. It is here because this is the screen you are standing on when a painting is not where you left it, and hunting through a settings page is no use to anybody at that moment. The full card, with what a restore does, is on the Configuration tab.

At the top of the left-hand side is Carry on: the painting you were last working on, with its picture, what is still left on it - "Card and Post to go" - and an Open button. It remembers from one day to the next on this device, so the morning starts where yesterday stopped. It goes away while a painting is open, and if the painting has been deleted since. Adding a new painting is the gold + Add button on the row with Paintings, Locations and To do, so it is there in all three; on an empty catalogue the big Add your paintings button is there instead.

If you got here by the brass Paintings button in the header, which closes whatever was open, Carry on offers that painting back. Pressing the Paintings tab does the same thing in one press.

On a narrow window the two halves fold into one, and the button that switches to this side reads "What's next" while nothing is open, rather than "Painting".

The walk round

While the catalogue is empty or has one painting in it, the cards come with a five-step list above them: add the record, add a photo, fill in the details, let it do the writing, make the first post. One painting, end to end. It stops there on purpose - the card, the certificate, the reel and the website are all easier to meet at the moment you want one, and a welcome that lists nineteen tabs is a welcome nobody finishes.

It ticks itself off. Each step goes green by reading the same thing the coloured ticks beside every painting read, on a real painting, so it cannot tell you that you have done something you have not, and it cannot miss it when you have. Nothing is written down to remember where you got to, so there is nothing to dismiss and nothing to reset.

Only the step you are on is a button. The ones after it are there to be read - seeing what is coming is most of the point - and pressing the live one takes you straight to the tab that does that job, with the painting already open.

Once there are two paintings it stops showing itself, because by then you have plainly got the idea. Show me round again under the cards brings it back whenever you want it, and it is on the Overview tab too, behind How do I start?

It follows whichever painting has got furthest, not the first one you added - so getting stuck on one piece and doing the work on another does not leave the list saying you have got nowhere.

Adding a painting

1. Press the brass Add paintings plate at the top of the left-hand column, and choose a photo of the painting. It is the first thing on the page and the only one that moves, which is deliberate: everything else on this tab is a way of looking at paintings you already have. Once there is a painting to carry on with, the plate gives way to the gold + Add button, which opens an empty painting with the photo area at the top. To start one with no photo yet, press Start one without a photo under the plate.
2. You can also drop a photo straight onto the left-hand column, or copy one and press Ctrl+V on the Paintings tab. Dropping a photo onto a painting's own photo swaps it for the new one, unless the photo is approved and locked. The app scales it down to 1600px on the long side and stores it as a JPEG. Aim for at least 1500px on the long side: the printed card and the certificate are cut from this image. A smaller photo isn't refused - the app shows it to you, says what it will cost in print sharpness, and lets you use it anyway. That's there for work in progress, a quick shot off your phone, or a piece that sold before you photographed it properly.
3. Fill in the Title, Medium, and Size. These three, along with the Category, Location, Mounting and signed date below them, are the seven fields the app calls the "details". Any one of them you fill in yourself turns the Details tick green with a dash; all seven turn it into a tick. The Location doesn’t count towards the green, because a new painting arrives already sitting in the Studio - it would have been green before you had typed a word.
4. Set the month and year the painting was signed, which the Pricing tab uses for the age discount. There is a Day box beside them too, optional and mostly for new work: it sharpens the painting’s certificate number from 2025-12 to 2025-12-26 and prints the full date on the back label. Older work that only knows the month is expected to go without, and reads as "August 2011" everywhere it is shown.
5. Pick a Category if you've set any up, or leave it as Uncategorized.
6. Set the Location - where the painting is right now. A new painting starts out in the Studio, and the field suggests locations you've used before. If it is ever blank, its label says NEEDED, the box carries a red left edge, and a Studio button sits beside it to fill it in one press.
7. Set Availability - For sale, Sold, or Not for sale. Marking a painting Sold reveals extra fields for sale price, buyer, date, and channel.
8. Press Save.

Pressing + Add twice in a row does not leave an empty one behind. Anything you have typed is saved on the way out of a painting - that is what stops a note typed in the last second going missing - but a brand new painting with nothing in it at all is dropped instead of filed.

Adding many paintings at once

1. Press Add paintings (or + Add, then the photo area) and choose as many photos as you like - hold Ctrl to pick several, or Ctrl+A for a whole folder. Or select them in File Explorer and drag them onto the left-hand column of the Paintings tab.
2. Each photo becomes a painting of its own. A strip above the tabs counts them in - 12 of 40 - and has a Stop button. Stopping keeps every painting already added.
3. If a photo's file name reads like a title - Harbour at dusk.jpg - that becomes the painting's title. A name a camera or phone made up, like IMG_4031.jpg, is left out and the painting starts Untitled, so it cannot end up on a card by mistake.
4. When it finishes, the strip says how many went in, and names anything that did not go to plan: photos under 1500px (fine on screen, may print soft), and files that could not be read as images. Press Show them to see the list newest first, with the new paintings at the top.

One photo is one painting to fill in, so choosing or dropping a single photo opens it straight away. Several go in together and wait in the list. A paste (Ctrl+V) fills the photo of the open painting only if it has none yet - it never replaces a photo that is already there; drag onto the photo to do that.

Approving the photo and the details

Two bars sit at the top of this tab, one over the photo and one over the seven details. Press "Approve and lock" on either and that part of the record is settled: its controls grey out, and its tick on the row under the painting's name becomes the boxed one you can read from across the list.

Unlocking is one press and asks nothing. This is here to stop an accidental nudge, not to stop you changing your mind.

• The photo lock holds everywhere the picture can be swapped. With it on, the Story and Reel tabs show a line saying where to go and unlock it in place of the "Use a different image" button.
• The details lock covers the seven fields that say what the piece is. Price, availability, the sale, awards and notes stay live underneath it - a painting whose details are settled still gets sold.
• Neither will lock something that isn't there. With no photo, the button is greyed and says to add one first.
• With a blank among the seven the details button is greyed too, and it names the one that is missing rather than reciting all seven: "Still blank: Location. Fill it in and this will lock the details." Under that is a small red button for each blank field - press it and the page scrolls to that box, puts the cursor in it, and rings it for a second.
• The field says the same thing at its own end: its label reads NEEDED in red and the box carries a red left edge, so an empty one doesn't look like every other empty one.

Approving is not the same as finishing. A photo in and seven fields filled already tick both steps green; the box on top says you have looked at them and are done deciding.

On the calendar

If a painting has been listed on a show or a deadline in the Calendar tab, it says so under Availability, with the date of each one. It's there to read, not to change - a piece is added to an event over on the Calendar tab, where the whole catalogue is in front of you at once.

Still to do

If a checklist somewhere has a job written against this painting, it's listed on the painting, naming the list it came from and the heading it sits under.

Tick a job off here and it's ticked on the list itself. It's the same job, not a copy of one - there is only ever one of it.

Jobs already done stay put, struck through. "Varnished already" is an answer worth having in front of you, and hiding it would leave the painting looking as though nothing had ever been asked of it.

You can't make or break a link from here. That's done on the Lists tab, where the work gets planned. "Open the list" takes you straight there.

Everything still to do

The third button above the catalogue, beside Paintings and Locations, is "To do". It gathers the outstanding work from every list at once and draws it as paintings rather than as words.

The grouping is the headings you wrote on your lists, and nothing else. A heading with jobs under it shows a count of how many paintings are waiting on it, which is the number you buy materials against - four boards, not three.

Only what's still open. A job you've ticked drops out, and so does a heading or a list with nothing left under it. It's a picture of what's owed, not a record of what's been done.

Click any row to open that painting. Tick the box to mark the job done without opening anything.

Back on the ordinary catalogue list, a painting with work waiting on it carries a small "3 to do" beside its title, so you can see it while scrolling.

A job whose painting has since been deleted still shows, saying the painting is no longer in the catalogue. The work is still owed to somebody, and quietly dropping it would be worse than an odd-looking line.

Progress photos

Under the painting's details there's room for up to six photos of the painting while it was still going - blocked in, half-finished, the day before you signed it. They're for your own record and for showing people how a piece came together.

• Press "+ Add photo" (or drop a photo onto it) to add one. There's no minimum size here, unlike the main image - a phone snap taken over the easel is exactly what these are for.
• They're stored smaller than the catalogue image, since nothing is printed from them - about a third of the room each. A painting carrying all six takes up roughly twice what the catalogue image alone does.
• Click a photo to select it, then "Remove this photo" to delete it, or "Make this the main image" to promote it. The photos renumber themselves so there's never a gap.
• They're never used on cards, certificates or posts - only the main image is. The one exception is the reel's optional collage slide, which lays several of them out on a frame of their own. Promoting one replaces the main image, and the image it replaces is not kept.
• They live in the catalogue folder with everything else, so they travel to the phone too, and they're deleted along with the painting.

The painting list

The catalogue lists every painting, each row led by a picture of the work, and under its name what is still left on it - "Card · Reel to go" - or, once there is nothing, "All done". A painting you haven't added an image to yet shows a plain framed square in place of the picture. The list runs the whole height of the page rather than sitting in a box of its own.

The full row of nine coloured progress ticks - Image, Details, Caption, Story, Social, Card, Papers, Post, and Reel, following the tabs in order - is on the line under the tab bar for whichever painting is open, and on the Overview tab. What "left" means on the list is exactly what those ticks count as outstanding, so the two always agree.

All ten say where they stand the same way, so you never have to remember which step you are looking at. Red with a dash means nothing started. Green with a dash means started but not finished. Green with a tick means finished. Green with a tick in a box means finished and locked. Hover any of them and it says which of the four it is in words, and names whatever it is still waiting on.

Not every step can show all four, and that's honest rather than a gap. A photograph is in or it isn't, so Image goes straight from a red dash to a green tick. Post and Reel have no lock at all: a post gets remade every time it's used, so there's no version of it worth freezing and they stop at the green tick.

Details means seven fields: title, category, location, medium, size, mounting and the signed date. One of them filled in turns it green with a dash, all seven turn it into a tick. The Location is the exception to the green: a new painting is created already in the Studio, so counting it would have left every new painting green from the moment it existed. It still has to be filled in for the tick. Price, availability and the sale aren't among them - those are what happened to a painting rather than what it is, and half a catalogue will never have them.

The two written steps tick as soon as the words are on the page. Locking one on the Story tab is what boxes it. The Card and the certificate wait on the words being written rather than on the lock, so nothing on the row ever sits red saying it's waiting for something already ticked beside it.

The last four - Card, Papers, Post and Reel - use their green dash for "ready". While the pieces they're built from are still missing they sit red: there's nothing to make them out of. Once everything they need is in hand they turn green but keep the dash. Make the thing and the dash becomes a tick.

Social is the step that is most often half done, because the captions come eight at a time and are usually written a couple at a time. Not a word written is red. Some written turns it green while the dash stays. All eight turns the dash into a tick, and locking all eight boxes it. Hover it and it tells you the count, as in "Started - 2 of 8 written".

Anything that can be settled can be locked, each on the tab where that work is done: the photo and the details here, the two written panels and the eight captions on Story, the card on Card and both documents on Papers. Locking is never the same as making. A card gets reprinted and a certificate gets reissued, so what the box records is that the thing has been looked at and settled and is not to be fiddled with.

Each waits on what it's actually assembled from, not on the whole story set. The Card and the certificate want both the Story and the Caption. The Post prints your caption over the picture, so it wants the image and the Caption. The Reel narrates the story, so it wants the image and the Story. The tick turns the first time you export from that tab, or - on Post - publish straight to Instagram or Facebook.

The certificate follows the painting's availability, so the tick tells you where you stand without having to open the record. A painting For sale or Sold owes one, and reads red, then green, like everything else - the point of doing it early is that when a buyer is standing in front of you the certificate is already made. A painting marked Not for sale owes nothing, ever, so it ticks in a quieter sage green: nothing outstanding, but nothing made either, and the row doesn't pretend otherwise. Such a painting counts as fully complete without a certificate.

Three views sit at the top:

• Paintings - the full filterable, sortable list.
• Locations - paintings grouped by where they are right now. Click one to jump to it.
• To do - the outstanding work from every checklist at once, drawn as paintings rather than as words.
• Search using the box at the top. It reads the title, the details you have typed - medium, size, mounting, signing date, category, location - and the buyer, the certificate number, your notes and any awards, so a painting can be found by something you wrote about it rather than only by its name. Type more than one word and each has to land somewhere, though not in the same place: "watercolour gallery" finds the watercolours out on loan. Clear the box with the × at its end, or by pressing Escape while you are in it.
• Beside the search is Filters. The order (A-Z, Needs work, Newest, Oldest), the year and "Missing" dropdowns, the categories, and Edit categories, Pick several and Edit detail lists are all in there, so the first painting sits right under the search. Whatever you have set shows on a line under the search - "Steamfolk · Missing Image" - with Clear beside it, so a narrowed list never looks like a list with paintings missing from it.
• The list shows 25 paintings at a time. Under the last one it says which these are - "26-50 of 61" - with Show 10, 25 or 50 to choose how many to a page (it remembers your choice on this computer or phone), and Prev, Next and the page numbers. A new search or filter starts again at page one, and opening a painting from somewhere else (Next up in the header, say) turns the list to its page. Back and Next up still step through every painting the filters show, not just the page on screen.
• Filter by category using the segment buttons (if you've created categories).
• Filter by the year a painting was completed using the year dropdown. It lists only the years you actually have paintings from, newest first, plus "No year set" for anything you haven't dated yet. Skipped years simply don't appear. The dropdown shows once at least one painting has a signed year.
• Sort A-Z (alphabetical), Needs work, Newest (most recently added first) or Oldest (longest in the catalogue first). Under Newest or Oldest, each row also says when it was added.
• Needs work puts anything missing something essential first - a photo, the details, the writing - and then whatever has most left to do. That is the same order the card board on the other half of this page works in, and the same order the Overview's panel ranks by, so none of the three can put a different painting at the top of the others' list. Finished paintings are not hidden; they take the tail, in the order they already had.
• Paintings catalogued before this ordering existed still sort correctly - the moment each one was added is recovered from its record, and anything too old to tell falls back to when it was last saved.
• Show only what still owes work using the "Missing" dropdown. "Missing anything" hides everything that's fully done; below it, pick a single step - Image, Details, Caption, Story, Social, Post or Reel - to list just the paintings still waiting on that one. Each line carries the count, so you can see where the work is before you pick. Half-written captions count as missing Social, because they are. A painting marked Not for sale counts as done at eight of nine, since it never needs a certificate.
• The counts follow whatever else you have set, so a category, a year and a search all narrow them first. The Card and the certificate aren't on the list: both are printed things whose need depends on how the painting is being sold, and the tick strip on each row already says where they stand.

It remembers how you left it

The view, the category, the sort, the year and the "Missing" dropdown all stay as you set them. Go off to Story and come back, or close the app and open it tomorrow, and the list is arranged the way you left it rather than back at the top of an unsorted catalogue.

The search box is the one thing that doesn't. Everything else is a way of looking at the whole catalogue and stays true until you change it; a search is one question about one painting, and coming back to a list still narrowed to something you typed twenty minutes ago would be the annoyance rather than the fix.

It is remembered on the machine you set it on, not in the catalogue, so the computer and the phone can each have the list the way that suits them. If you rename or delete the category you were filtered to, or the last painting from the year you picked goes, that filter drops back to "All" rather than leaving you looking at an empty list.

Back and Next

With a painting open, ‹ Back and Next › sit in the top right corner of the line under the tab bar, at the end of the row of ticks. They open the painting either side of this one without going back to the list, and they are on every tab - the Story, Card and Reel all follow the painting you land on.

They walk whatever the Paintings list is showing rather than the whole catalogue, and that is the point of them. A search, a category, a year or the "Missing" dropdown all narrow what Next offers, and the narrowing travels with you: filter down to the paintings still missing a story, and Next goes to the next of those while you are on the Story tab, where the list is not on the page at all.

The count between the two buttons is how the filter shows its hand. "4 of 21" with sixty paintings catalogued means something is narrowing the list to twenty-one. Hover it and it says which in words.

Both ends wrap round, so neither button is ever a dead one: Next on the last painting opens the first. A painting opened from somewhere else - the Sales tab, say - that isn't in the narrowed list walks the whole catalogue instead of being stranded. A new painting you haven't saved yet shows no buttons at all, since there is no "of" to say yet.

Alt+Left and Alt+Right do the same thing from the keyboard, and follow the same list.

Save a spreadsheet

"Save a spreadsheet" is the last thing in the Filters panel, beside the search box. It writes the catalogue out as a file you can open in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets, one row per painting, for the questions a spreadsheet answers better than this app does - what the watercolours took last year, which pieces have been at the gallery longest, how much is hanging in the house right now.

It saves whatever is showing, not the whole catalogue. Narrow the list by category, year, search or what's missing first, and the sheet follows - a line under the button tells you how many it is about to save when that is fewer than you have.

The columns are the title, category, medium, size, mounting, the painted date and the year on its own, availability, price, what it sold for and when and to whom and through where, where it is now, the certificate number, awards, notes, what is still to do, and when it was added and last changed.

Prices go in as plain numbers so a column of them adds up, and the dates as year-month-day so a column of them sorts as dates rather than as words. Accented titles come through intact in Excel on Windows, which they do not from an ordinary text file.

• "Include the caption" and "Include the story" add the written words on the end, as one more column each. They are ticks rather than a second button because a sheet with the words and a sheet without are the same sheet.
• The words live inside each painting rather than in the list, so ticking either means the app has to open every painting showing. It says so, counts its way through, and on a big catalogue over a phone signal it is a real wait. The plain sheet comes out instantly.

The file is named for the day it was made, and separately depending on whether it carries the words - so saving one of each in the same folder on the same day doesn't quietly replace the first.

Categories

Open Filters and press "Edit categories" to create, rename, or delete categories. Categories are just labels for filtering the list - a painting can belong to one category or none.

Keeping Medium, Size and Mounting consistent

Those three boxes take anything you like to type, which over a few years is how one answer ends up written three ways - "12 x 12 in", "12x12", "12 × 12″". Nothing breaks when that happens; the card and the certificate print whatever they are given. What you lose is the ability to ask the catalogue how many twelve-inch squares you have painted, and a wall label that matches the one next to it.

"Edit detail lists", beside "Edit categories", is where you settle that. Each of the three fields has its own list and its own switch. On "Anything" - which is how every catalogue starts, and stays until you change it - the box takes whatever you type and the list is only offered underneath as suggestions. On "Only these" the box becomes a dropdown and takes what is on the list and nothing else.

You do not have to type the list out. "Start from what I have written" fills it with every answer already in your catalogue, commonest first, and you tidy from there.

Renaming an entry also changes every painting that says it - that is the part that actually puts a catalogue straight, and the number beside each entry tells you how many that will be. Removing one with "×" does not touch your paintings: they keep saying what they said.

Underneath, the panel lists any answer in your catalogue that is not on the list. Where it is only a matter of capitals or spacing you get a button naming what it would become, and one press moves those paintings onto it. Where it is a genuinely different answer, "Keep" adds it to the list and leaves the paintings alone.

Switching a field to "Only these" never empties anything. A painting whose answer is not on the list keeps it, still shows it, and says underneath that it is not on the list - so you can see what is left to tidy rather than finding a blank line on a certificate later. And a list with nothing on it yet leaves the box as free text, so the switch can't lock you out of a field.

Deleting a painting

"Delete this painting" sits at the bottom of the painting's details and asks you to confirm before it does anything. Deleting takes everything kept with that painting: the image, its progress photos, the stories and captions, the story prompt settings, the card layout, the reel's close-up crops, the collage slide's arrangement, and any background photo uploaded for it on the Post or Reel tab. Nothing of it is left behind on disk.

You do get one chance to change your mind. A painting you have just deleted is offered back above the catalogue list, and "Put it back" restores the whole of it - the image and the progress photos included - exactly as it was. The offer holds while you carry on working, and across a switch to another tab and back, but it is one painting at a time: dismissing it, deleting another painting, or closing the app all let it go. After that it really is gone.

This makes the catalogue a reasonable place to work something out and then clear away. If you want a post or a reel of a piece that isn't finished, you can add the work-in-progress photo as its own painting, build whatever you like from it, save what you exported, and then delete the record when you're done. Give those a category like "WIP" and the category filter keeps them out of your way in the meantime.

"That painting had nothing saved behind it, so it has been taken off the list." You may see that once, and it is not a fault you caused. It means the catalogue was listing a painting whose details had never been written - a save that was refused halfway, most likely because the other device had the catalogue at that moment. Such an entry opened as nothing at all and could not be deleted, because Delete lives inside the opened painting. From 1.74.0, opening one clears it away and tells you. Nothing is lost, because there was nothing there to lose, and it cannot happen to a new painting - a painting is no longer added to the list unless it actually saved.

If instead you are told the painting could not be read and to check your connection, that is the opposite case and nothing has been removed. The details are there; the app could not reach them this second. Try again when you have signal.

A delete can be refused, and when it is, the red question stays open and says why underneath the button you pressed - most often because the other device is holding the catalogue, or the folder has moved. Nothing is removed. Earlier the question simply closed and the painting was still in the list, which reads exactly like a button that did nothing, and a painting that would not delete could come back with its card layout, captions and reel crops taken off it. The painting itself is asked for first now: either it goes and everything kept with it follows, or nothing is touched at all.

The "Are you sure?" belongs to the painting it was asked about. Arm it, change your mind, click a different painting in the list, and the question is closed again - it no longer follows you onto the next painting with the button still armed.

Deleting is not the same as marking Not for sale. Not for sale keeps the painting in your catalogue and simply stops the app asking for a certificate.

Location and sales

Every painting has a Location field - type whatever makes sense (Studio, a gallery name, Shipped, On loan). The field remembers locations you've used before and suggests them as you type.

Under it is a way to keep the painting's history. When a piece moves, type where it went in the "Moved it? Log where it went" box and press "Log move": the app sends the painting there and stamps the date onto a trail below, newest first, so you build up a record of where the work has been. The Location field above stays free to correct - fixing a mistyped gallery name is not a move - so logging is the deliberate act that gets written down. Any line in the trail can be removed with the × beside it if you log one by mistake. The history is kept with the painting, so undoing a deletion or restoring from a file brings it back intact.

• Under the trail is "Booked in" - the events this painting is going to, with their dates and how long you have. Shows still to come are named in full; ones it has already been to are counted. It is shown here and changed on the Calendar tab, under that event's own "Pieces" list, which is where the booking is made.
• The Locations view groups every painting by its current location so you can see at a glance where everything is.
• When you mark a painting Sold, extra fields appear: Sale price, Buyer, Sale date, and Channel (direct, gallery, show, or online).
• The buyer can be picked from your Contacts instead of typed. Press "Pick from Contacts" and the name fills itself in, and that contact's page then lists this painting under what they have bought. "Unlink" turns it back into ordinary text - useful for a one-off buyer you have no reason to keep.
• Everything you record here adds up on the Sales tab, which has its own topic.

Picking several at once

"Pick several" sits beside "Edit categories", in the Filters panel. Press it and the list becomes a picker: click paintings to tick them, or press "All" to take everything the filters are currently showing. Nothing at all happens until you choose one of the actions, so you can pick freely and change your mind.

• Move them to - sets the same location on every painting picked, for the day a dozen pieces go out to one gallery.
• File them as - puts them all in one category, or takes them out of every category.
• Export web images - makes web-sized, watermarked copies of all of them at once, the same sizes and the same watermark the Images tab uses.

The paintings stay picked after an action, so you can move a group and then file it without choosing them all over again. Press "Done" to leave picking mode.

Starting another like this one

"Start another like this" is at the bottom of the painting's details, next to "Make a painting card". It opens a new, empty painting already carrying the medium, size, mounting, category, location and price of the one you were on. The picture and everything written about the piece do not come across - only the details that tend to be the same across a set. It saves retyping the same three fields for every piece in a series.

Keeping a painting off the website

Under Notes there is a tick called "Keep this painting off the website". Not every piece is for showing - a commission still with the person who ordered it, a study kept for the record, something sold privately. Before this, the publisher took the whole catalogue and sent the lot.

A painting with that tick stays in the catalogue and goes on working everywhere else. It is in the list, it has a card, a story, a certificate and a place in your figures. It is only the website it is kept out of: Publish will not send it, and Check first will not offer to.

It cannot take a page down. If a painting is already on your website and you tick it afterwards, the page that is already there stays there until you delete it in WordPress. Check first says so beside every one of them, so you can see which. Deleting a live page on your website because a box was ticked is not something a tick should be able to do on its own.

The tick is only about your website. It does not affect Instagram, Facebook, Threads or Bluesky - those are posted from the Post tab, one at a time, by you.

Other fields

• Mounting - how the painting is presented (cradled board, framed and matted, etc.).
• Price - typed here as a plain number, with the dollar sign shown beside the box rather than typed into it, or worked out on the Pricing tab and applied. Sale price works the same way. Anywhere a price is shown back to you it reads properly, so 1400 typed here comes back as $1,400 in the list and on the card.
• A price set before this change that can't be read as a number - a range like "1400-1600", or a note like "on request" - is neither guessed at nor thrown away. The box starts empty and says underneath what was there, so you can retype it as a figure or leave it exactly as it is.
• Awards and recognition - shows, juried entries, prizes, press. One per line.
• Notes - anything else worth remembering. For your own reference.

Open a painting by clicking its row in the list. Once one is open, the other tabs fill in around it - you don't have to go back and paste anything.

The rest of the Help

Start here

• Getting started with Sundry Works - What Sundry Works does and how the tabs fit together.
• Using Sundry Works on your phone - Setting up the phone, whether or not there is a computer as well.

Your catalogue

• What's due and what's unfinished - The first tab: what's coming up, what's still to do, what's unfinished.
• Cataloguing your paintings - Your catalog - add paintings and open the one you're working on.
• Reviewing everything one painting makes - Everything the open painting makes, on one page, with the one decision each needs.
• How to price a painting consistently - Work out a consistent price for the open painting.
• Tracking what sold and who bought it - What sold, who took it home, and what it brought in.
• Printing show labels and a portfolio - More than one at a time: a whole show's labels, or a portfolio to send.

Making things from a painting

• Writing a story for a painting - Generate a written story for the painting and keep the best one.
• Making a printed card for a painting - Lay out the printed card for the painting.
• How to make a certificate of authenticity - A painting's two printed documents: its certificate, and the label for its back.
• Web-sized copies of a painting's photo - Export web-sized copies of the painting's photo.
• Branded posts of your paintings - Branded static posts for Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
• Making a reel of a painting - Build the vertical reel frame and video for social media.
• Designing an artist's business card - The card you hand out, laid out down to the last millimetre.

Running the business

• Setting up your artist brand - Set up once: your identity, brand assets, colours, and AI key.
• An address book for galleries and collectors - A simple address book for galleries, collectors, suppliers, and more.
• Checklists for shows and studio jobs - Reusable checklists for shows, errands, and anything you repeat.
• A calendar for shows and deadlines - Shows, deadlines, and events, with a countdown to each one.
• All your post comments in one list - What people said on your posts, from every platform, in one list.

Connections and setup

• Posting to Instagram and Facebook - Connect your accounts so you can post directly from Sundry Works.
• Posting your paintings to Threads - A second Meta connection, separate from Instagram and Facebook.
• Posting your paintings to Bluesky - The easiest connection of the four - a handle and an app password.
• Scheduling posts to go out later - Line a post up now and let it go out later, with the computer off.
• Configuring Sundry Works - Where everything plugs in: your social accounts, your website, your AI service, and where the catalogue lives.